“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.”
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“We tell people to follow their dreams, but you can only dream of what you can imagine, and, depending on where you come from, your imagination can be quite limited.”
― Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood
― Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood
“In photography there is no meantime. There was just that moment and now there’s this moment and in between there is nothing. Photography, in a way, is the negation of chronology.”
― The Ongoing Moment: A Book About Photographs
― The Ongoing Moment: A Book About Photographs
“Our life is to be regarded as a loan received from death, with sleep as the daily interest on this loan.”
― On the Suffering of the World
― On the Suffering of the World
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Sam’s 2025 Year in Books
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